The Mariner’s Disappearance: revision as sterilizing practice

In his “Preface” Wordsworth expresses a tense relationship with the literary marketplace and mechanisms of print. His chief anxiety is the modern subject’s increasing intellectual torpor, brought on by, among other things, the rapid circulation and proliferation of periodicals and newspapers. The wide availability of trashy literature is also a concern, and he laments the tendency of his fellow readers to gravitate toward “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” Capitalism, it seems, is against poor Wordsworth, for it grinds people down to dullness and then manufactures crappy stuff for them to entertain themselves out of and back into their stupors. How, then, might we talk about Wordsworth himself as an agent of print culture and the literary marketplace? Both he and Coleridge need the marketplace to matter and believe that it does, to which their revisions and prefaces attest. They need a readership invested in comparison among volumes in order to make the editions mean. This problem of their investment in a readership across editions becomes especially clear for me when I look at Coleridge’s revision of the “Mariner” from 1798 to 1800. In the first version, the mariner is localized, regionalized, and arguably written as “common.” In the 1800 "Mariner" many of the colloquialisms and regional dialect choices have been erased, leaving a “cleaner,” less “rough” poem. This makes very little sense when you take into consideration Wordsworth’s commitment to real language of common folk. What invisible marketplace machinations encouraged Coleridge to sterilize his protagonist’s iterations, and how can we read that choice in relation to Wordsworth fanatical diatribe against the mechanisms of print culture?